Ex-legislator sent to prison for corruption

Wednesday

Jan 23, 2013 at 12:01 AMJan 23, 2013 at 12:19 PM

Former state Rep. Clayton Luckie is heading to prison for up to three years and must repay the state nearly $12,000 for improperly spending about $130,000 in campaign funds, then falsifying documents to cover up his actions. • Both Secretary

Jim Siegel, The Columbus Dispatch

Former state Rep. Clayton Luckie is heading to prison for up to three years and must repay the state nearly $12,000 for improperly spending about $130,000 in campaign funds, then falsifying documents to cover up his actions.

Both Secretary of State Jon Husted and Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien say the case shows the need to modernize Ohio’s campaign-finance law.

Ohio law requires disclosure of contributions and spending. But ensuring those reports are fully accurate — or not totally falsified — requires a look at campaign bank records that are inaccessible to anyone without subpoena power.

Luckie’s actions went on for six years and were only caught when the FBI happened to come across an unreported $300 contribution to his campaign as a result of a broader investigation into payday-lending lobbying.

After Luckie was sentenced yesterday, O’Brien was asked what message people should take from the case. His answer: The state should start requiring candidates to file bank statements with their campaign-finance reports.

“It is an honor system,” he said of the current setup. “You file your expenditures, but you don’t have to submit the bank statements. No one really knows if they’re false unless you look at the underlying bank accounts.”

Husted agrees that lawmakers should require the filing of bank statements.

“It would be a welcome improvement that would be very easy for candidates’ campaigns to comply with,” Husted said. “It would be a simple, painless reform that makes it harder to violate campaign-finance law.”

Luckie, a Dayton Democrat who left office at the end of December, pleaded guilty yesterday in Franklin County Common Pleas Court to eight felony charges, including money laundering and grand theft, making him the second state lawmaker in six months sent to prison as a result of an FBI investigation.

He initially faced 49 counts. O’Brien said the deal “covered the most egregious conduct we discovered.”

Luckie’s plea also included six counts of felony election falsification — one for each year in office — and a misdemeanor charge of failure to disclose on his state filings. Investigators said his spending included $1,700 in cash withdrawals at three casinos, $1,800 for a home-equity-loan payment, $9,825 in checks written to himself and thousands spent at retail businesses and in ATM withdrawals.

FBI officials said Luckie’s false record-keeping began almost immediately after he was named to the House in 2006, when he forged the name of the man he said was his campaign treasurer. He created false invoices and receipts of companies including Dayton Printery and the German Village Inn.

“The very first one he filed in April 2006 was a false report. The very last one he filed in April 2012 was a false report,” O’Brien said. “There were checks and cash withdrawals that were converted to personal use on as large a scale as I have seen.”

Visiting Franklin County Judge Alan Travis sentenced Luckie to three years in prison, per the plea agreement, and ordered him to repay the state $11,893 for the salary he received as a state representative after his indictment in October.

Luckie, 49, rebuffed calls by leaders in both parties to resign from his House seat, though for months he did not appear for voting sessions or committees.

When reports revealed this past summer that he was going to face felony charges, he agreed to pull his name off the ballot.

Luckie, who was joined in court by about a dozen family members, spoke before he was sentenced, issuing a list of apologies “for the errors in judgments that I have made,” adding that “I accept full responsibility for my actions.”

“I tried to act in my job to the best of my capability,” he said, noting the long days and efforts to take care of constituents. “I think I spread myself a little thin.”

Luckie’s attorney, Lloyd Pierre-Louis, said his client was not a campaign-finance expert and, in Luckie’s mind, wasn’t stealing.

“He didn’t understand how to manage campaign accounts properly,” Pierre-Louis said. “In his view, he was taking money and using it for proper expenses when, at times, they weren’t.”

When it was noted that Luckie’s falsification of documents made it appear he understood campaign finance better than he was getting credit for, Pierre-Louis said, “I don’t see it that way. He did not properly track his expenses, and he paid for it.”

Luckie will report to prison on March?18. He can petition for early release in as little as six months, but O’Brien said he will oppose that.

Asked if his client could have been caught sooner, Pierre-Louis said, “He turned in his campaign-finance reports like everyone else. I think there’s a lot of self-reporting, and it takes a little investigation by the state to determine if someone is accurate or inaccurate.”

Investigators said Luckie’s actions were blatant, but if the FBI hadn’t secured his bank records, they might not have been discovered.

“The system did work in this case,” Husted said. But with regular disclosure of bank records, “ it would have happened much earlier and can serve as a deterrent going forward.”

Husted said he has discussed the idea with some lawmakers, and he does not see who would oppose a bank-records requirement. “Legislators are concerned with how this reflects on the institution,” he said.

In mid-June, former House Democrat W. Carlton Weddington of Columbus, after an FBI sting, pleaded guilty to one count each of bribery, election falsification and an ethics violation and was sentenced to three years in prison.

FBI agents posing as businessmen gave Weddington all-expenses-paid trips, cash and contributions in exchange for him introducing legislation.